Tarzan’s remarkable foresight in vanquishing the Belgian evildoers before the worst of King Leopold II’s reign of terror opens the door for his future films, where our hero stops historical catastrophes in their early stages.

Not one of the hundreds of foreign correspondents who chronicled the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War looked up at the ominous V-shaped formations of Hitler’s bombers and wondered: Whose fuel is powering those aircraft?

Go to war and every politician will thank you, and they’ll continue to do so—with monuments and statues, war museums and military cemeteries—long after you’re dead. But who thanks those who refused to fight, even in wars that most people later realized were tragic mistakes?

In a country that uses every possible occasion to celebrate its “warriors,” many have forgotten that Monday’s holiday originally marked a peace agreement. Veterans Day in the United States originally was called Armistice Day and commemorated the cease-fire that, at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, ended the First World War.

For all the spectacle of thundering cavalry charges, muddy trenches and wartime love and loss, the current popular storytellers of the First World War skip over the conflict’s greatest moral drama by leaving out part of its cast of characters.